Charles Powell

Lord Powell of Bayswater KCMG joined the Diplomatic Service in 1963 and served successively as Third Secretary, Foreign Office, 1963-65 (Desk officer, Muscat and Oman); Second Secretary, Helsinki [Finland] 1965-67; Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 1968-71; First Secretary and Private Secretary to HM Ambassador (Lord Cromer), Washington [United States] 1971-74; First Secretary, Bonn [Germany], 1974-77; FCO, 1977-80 (Counsellor, 1979; Special Counsellor for Rhodesia [later Zimbabwe and Zambia] negotiations, 1979-80); Counsellor, UK Permanent Representation to European Communities, 1980-84.

In 1983-91 he was Private Secretary and adviser on foreign affairs and defence to [Margaret Thatcher] and for the first months of John Major's government.

Since 1992 he has been an "international businessman", currently serving on the board of a number of major companies including Caterpillar, Schindler in Switzerland, Yell Group in the UK and Mandarin Oriental Hotels, Safinvest Limited and Chairman of Louis Vuitton Moet-Hennessy, British Mediterranean Airways, and Northern Trust Global Services

Powell is also a member of the International Advisory Boards of Rolls Royce, Barrick Gold, Magna Corporation and the UK advisory boards of Hicks Muse, Thales, GEMS Oriental & General Fund, International, Alfa, Wingate Capital ACE and Diligence.

He is a cross-bench member of the House of Lords, where he serves on the Economic Affairs Committee. He is Chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Entrepreneurship.

Previous directorships include Jardine Matheson Holdings and associated companies (1992-2000), National Westminster Bank, Arjo Wiggins Appleton, Said Holdings, J. Rothschild Name Co., Phillips, de Pury & Luxembourg, Arjo Wiggins Appleton, Trafalgar House.

Family

Powell has three brothers, Chris (a senior figure in Boase Massimi Pollitt and who worked for Labour's advertising campaign in 1987), Roderick and Jonathan Powell, who became the Chief of Staff to Tony Blair's privately funded office private office, a member of the Labour Party. His wife is Carla Bonardi who he married in 1964. Thought of as 'highly extrovert" she accompanied Peter Mandelson to a conference organised by the North Atlantic Initiative.

Scott Inquiry

Norton-Taylor notes that the Scott Inquiry (into the arming of Iraq) did not summon Powell to give evidence in public and only requested written evidence from him in the summer of 1994, six months after Thatcher's testimony to the inquiry. Powell told Channel 4's Dispatches programme, in answer to a series of written questions in April 1994, that, at that stage, he had not been asked to give evidence, and he had not volunteered any. In an interview in The Times newspaper on September 6, 1994, he said:

"You have to take some things on your own shoulders, you've got to turn things away, to let a Prime Minister free from the detail"

Powell added cryptically:

"At the outset, the inquiry accepted that the Prime Minister knew everything about everything. In general, it was good to cultivate that view, but not in this case."

Norton-Taylor states that the inquiry highlighted the extraordinary power of officials in ministers' private offices. "There is a freemasonry among private secretaries, where they have more licence to express their personal views than some of the rest of us," Sir Robin Butler, himself a former principle private secretary at 10 Downing Street, told the inquiry with more seriousness than jest. Private secretaries control the flow of papers coming to ministers and decide what should be placed, and in what order, inside the red boxes ministers take home at night and at weekends. One senior civil servant told the author, "Private secretaries are more important than permanent secretaries. They keep ministers informed, but they also take decisions on what ministers see."

Apropos of the Al-Yamamah Arms Deal and the role of Wafic Said, Gambill (2003) stated in Middle East Intelligence Bulletin (an offshoot of Pipes and Kristol's Middle East Forum) that:

"Sir Charles Powell, a long-time foreign policy advisor of Thatcher who was present during the negotiations for this deal, was later hired as chairman of Sagitta Asset Management Limited, of which [Wafic] Said is the primary shareholder."

Stephen Glover in The Spectator of 24 November, 2001, quotes Powell as refuting such allegations:

"I am indeed a friend of Mr Said's, and am proud to be so: he is a remarkable man and an extraordinary benefactor of good causes in this country. But I conduct no business on his behalf in Syria or elsewhere in the Middle East. Nor do I have any connection with First Saudi Investment Company to which Mr Glover refers."

But maintains:

"The two men first met in the late 1980s when Lord Powell was the prime minister's private secretary and Mr Said was involved in the 20 billion Al Yamamah arms contract between Britain and Saudi Arabia. In 1994, having left the Foreign Office, Lord Powell became a director of Said Holdings. In 1996 Mr Said made him a trustee (unpaid) of the Oxford Business School which he had just endowed. In February of this year Lord Powell became chairman of Sagitta Asset Management Ltd, which is Mr Said's main investment vehicle. Sagitta, and the companies with similar names clustered around it (e.g. Sagitta Investment Advisers Ltd), would repay hours of study. Last year Sagitta Asset Management made a loss of 1,238,395 on a turnover of 2,524,097 and paid its highest-paid director 910,000. All the Sagitta companies are subsidiaries of Sagitta International Limited, registered in Bermuda and controlled by Wafic Said."

Powell became a paid adviser to BAE's chairman and was caught up in The Guardian's investigation into Al Yamamah:

"Since 2003 he has been a political adviser to BAE's chairman, firstly Dick Evans and then Dick Oliver. In 2005 it was revealed that Tony Blair was employing him as his special envoy to Brunei, at the same time as BAE was embroiled in a dispute with the south-east Asian state over the purchase of three warships. Powell denied a conflict of interests."

The Guardian argues that Powell and his family "have intimate knowledge of the al-Yamamah deals". His younger brother Jonathan was Tony Blair's chief of staff "when the Saudis put pressure on Downing Street in 2006 to drop the Serious Fraud Office inquiry." Saudi officials are reported to have "met Powell to communicate their anger." Charles Powell's son, Hugh, "heads the Foreign Office's security policy department, which is concerned with BAE."

Oxford Business School

After leaving John Major's transition team in 1991, Lord Powell joined the board of Said Holdings and the board of the Said Business School at Oxford University.

The school was itself the subject of controversy. Mr Said donated £20m and its location was shifted from a central playing field to a car park by Oxford railway station.

Michael White writing in The Guardian in 2001, stated that as well as the vice-chancellor of Oxford and three senior academic colleagues, the trustees of the business school include five appointed by Mr Said, subject only to the vice-chancellor's approval. They are Lord Alexander of Weedon (chairman of the NatWest Group of companies), Robert Genillard (a Swiss financier and industrialist), Professor William Pounds (formerly Dean of the Sloan School of Management, MIT) Ms Catherine Roe (Director of the Karim Rida Said Foundation which commemorates Mr Said's late son) and Lord Powell.

Affiliations

• Aspen Institute
• Atlantic Partnership
• British Museum
• China-Britain Business Council
• Henry Jackson Society
• Oxford University Business School Foundation
• International Institute for Strategic Studies
• New Atlantic Initiative